BackupAssist, a provider of automated Windows Server backup and recovery software for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has announced version 10 of the company's popular BackupAssist backup and disaster recovery software.

The developer says the new software allows customers and partners to cost-effectively leverage existing cloud accounts and infrastructure with their choice of redundancy level and backup vault locations to meet cost, compliance, and performance requirements.

According to International Data Corp. (IDC): "The data protection and recovery market is forecast to continue growing at a faster pace than overall IT spending. This means that IT organizations are prioritizing data protection and recovery activities and directing more resources to them. Much of this growth is in the software and cloud segments, which are growing the fastest."

Small and medium enterprises want a choice on where their backup data is saved and replicated to. Additionally, they want the highest efficiency backup solution possible, where the backup provider does not have a conflict of interest in providing both de-duplication and the storage repository.

With BackupAssist 10, customers can choose their cloud vendor and are provided with the ability to determine the physical locations where their data will be stored. Furthermore, with cloud independence, customers can be assured of receiving the maximum data deduplication/compression efficiency because the customer selects the final backup storage location, eliminating backup and storage provider conflicts of interest.

"BackupAssist 10 is designed specifically for small-medium enterprises focusing on ease-of-use and reliability. The software provides platform protection for Hyper-V and support for key applications such as Microsoft SQL, marking its territory in the SME segment," said Phil Goodwin, Research director at IDC.

"The latest generation software adds multi-cloud support for Amazon AWS S3 and Microsoft Azure infrastructure, providing greater customization in how IT environments are protected."

BackupAssist 10 has several new features that set the software apart from alternative products on the market. Advanced capabilities in version 10 include:

Cloud Storage Independence: Unlike most backup and recovery software, which is tied down to use the vendor's own cloud storage, BackupAssist 10 provides true cloud independence. This design allows the customer to choose where to store backup data -- allowing the selection of the most appropriate cloud storage resource. Current options include Amazon AWS S3 and Microsoft Azure.

The new feature provides a pay-per-use option and is ideal for customers who do not want to pay for storage space they are not using. Support for additional public and private cloud options will be announced in 2017.

Utilizing AES-256 encryption, each container is completely independent of each other, even if multiple containers exist on the same cloud account or in multi-tenanted systems. Different encryption keys are used for each container and the cloud provider has zero-knowledge of the content, mitigating the risk of data theft.

Nearly 4X Data Deduplication and Compression: Reduces bandwidth use and storage space needs when backing up to the cloud. Testing results reveal that in typical customer deployments, new compression and deduplication algorithms provide up to 71 percent space savings for on-premises or in the cloud.